“Dog Vomit” slime moldSteven Shaviro has a wonderful post up on slime molds and other strange beasties so head over there as soon as you can.
The point is, Shaviro is adding some evidence for something I was sketching out purely speculatively in The Ecological Thought, namely that we've been looking for cognition in the wrong place, as a bonus prize for being highly evolved. What an absurdly anti-Darwinian notion.
Instead, I wonder, why not look for consciousness lower down? Thus I'm happy to report that fruit flies exhibit decision-like behavior. Bacteria talk to one another. Slime molds solve mazes. And look at this website devoted to plant cognition, for real.
This is going to be good for my work in Ben Woodard's and my Thinking Nature.
2 comments:
Isn't it nice when Science(!) deigns to confirm our crazy hypotheses?
I seem to remember either Ben or Michael of Complete Lies discussing slime molds in connection with Michel Henry. That might be an interesting path to look into, if you haven't already.
Tim, check out this link ... I think you'll find it right up (y)our alley ...ni'm sending it to Steven too:
On the Xenotext Experiment by the Canadian poet, (cited in Peter Watts' blog)
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=1719
Best,
Davide
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